“What does it mean to be human? What does it mean to make things?,” painter Amy Ellingson SC ’86 asked an audience at Scripps College’s Clark Humanities Museum, where her paintings hang among four decades worth of student digital art. “Especially now with AI making that question even more pressing,” she continued.
A few feet away sat a beige 1993 Macintosh Performa, loaded with the same programs Scripps students used to make digital art three decades ago. As AI generates images in seconds, “Pixel Palettes: 40 Years of Digital Art at Scripps College” asks visitors to look back and consider the human-centered history of digital art.
The exhibition, which opened Oct. 21 and runs through Dec. 4, is co-curated by art professor Nancy Macko and art history professor Zsofi Valyi-Nagy as part of Scripps’ centennial celebration, which began this semester. Challenging assumptions that digital art is often future-oriented, immaterial and male-dominated, the show offers a historical, materially grounded and feminist account that positions Scripps as a leading institution of digital art.
The show is built around the archive of Macko, who founded the Scripps Digital Art Program in 1990. More than 100 student works made since then are on view, both hung as framed prints and displayed on the vintage Macs they were made on. At an interactive workstation, visitors can try PixelPaint Professional and Aldus Freehand, the programs Macko first taught with.
Student work hangs alongside pieces by Ellingson, Monica Furmanski SC ’96 and Scripps art and media studies faculty who have created digital artwork.
Ellingson, now based in Santa Fe, returned Oct. 22 to give a talk in the gallery titled “Between the Pixel and the Hand: Systems, Repetition, and the Making of a Painting.” Her story begins just before the one the exhibition tells. She graduated from Scripps in 1986, before computers were part of the art curriculum; Ellingson’s first encounter with digital art was at the California Institute of the Arts.
She said that at the time, many people there insisted that the act of painting was dead, but the computer lab always sat empty. One day, she passed by the empty room and had a thought that ultimately drove the rest of her career.
“I kind of just had this flash one day that maybe all of [the computers] in this room will somehow make me better at painting some day,” Ellingson said.
From there, her career trajectory ran parallel to the machines in the gallery. On a computer with two megabytes of memory, she started on the first versions of Photoshop and Illustrator — software from the same era as the programs at the exhibition’s workstations.
Like the students whose work fills the museum, Ellingson came to view the computer as what she said MIT sociologist Sherry Turkle called an “object to think with.”
“If I [can] work through the ideas on a computer, nothing is ever ruined,” Ellingson said. “You can start over again and again.”
That ease of copying led her to make a series of nearly identical paintings, which she compared to siblings who share the same genes but look different. She referenced Gertrude Stein’s idea that nothing is ever repeated exactly the same way it was made.
Kaylee Morehead SC ’29, who attended the talk for class, was drawn to Ellingson’s conception of repetition.
“I really liked the Gertrude Stein [discussion of] repetition — looking at repetition not necessarily as the exact same thing, but as different individual expressive gestures,” Morehead said.
This is where Ellingson and the exhibition intersect. Both reject the idea of digital art as somehow weightless compared to physical art. The curators display carefully-crafted student files on their original hardware, and Ellingson takes her designs from the screen to the canvas and then proceeds to paint them by hand. Showing the labor behind digital art complicates the commonplace image of easily-generated digital art.
When an audience member asked Ellingson why she doesn’t just print her art, the room went quiet.
“I think of painting as one of the most human expressions on planet Earth,” Ellingson said. “I’m interested in that amazing history and the activity that I think is just so beautifully human.”
“I think of painting as one of the most human expressions on planet Earth,” Ellingson said. “I’m interested in that amazing history and the activity that I think is just so beautifully human.”
Amirah Lockett PO ’26 agreed. She thought the emphasis on both digital and printed art — and the ways they can interact with one another — stood out among other ideas.
“I thought the response [to AI] was very powerful,” Lockett said.
Physical presence, Ellington argued, will only matter more as AI spreads.
“We do live [as] bodies in this material, physical world,” she said. “I think that is becoming more and more important as we start to distinguish ourselves from AI and robots.”
Even her machines resist AI’s polish. Her drawing robots spend up to 80 hours on a single piece, and dry or crooked pencils can easily ruin them. During her talk, she called the survivors of these often fickle machines a “beautiful imperfection.”
Current students are adding to the archive Ellingson’s work now belongs to, writing wall texts and artist interviews for the exhibition’s upcoming website. Abi Conrado Sabido PO ’27, who is building the site, said putting the show online raised the same questions about originality that AI does.
“Especially with digital work, you can make infinite copies of it, and that’s such a weird philosophical issue,” Conrado Sabido said. “We’re starting to have to think a lot more about originality and its connections to AI.”
Taken together, Ellingson’s career and “Pixel Palettes” makes an argument for why art and human artists will always be essential to one another. Every new digital tool, from early paint programs to today’s AI, seemed revolutionary when it arrived, but each one still needed a person to decide what to create. AI is simply the latest iteration of that revolutionary idea.
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